A solid movie, with enough of the elements that make smart horror work.

Rating: 10/10 (3 July 2003)

A few minor spoilers.
These zombies aren't undead - they're `the infected,' altered by disease that fills its host with mindless, dehumanizing rage. The infectee's transformation is complete less than a minute after contact, and a drop of blood in the eyes is enough to spread the disease. After a fantastic opening showing the origins of the disease, our hero, Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes from a coma in an abandoned hospital. In the four weeks that Jim has been sleeping, the disease has ended civilization. Jim wanders through empty London, echoing the famous `Hello?!' scene in Day of the Dead. _28 Days Later_ is post-apocalyptic, post-AIDS, and post-Romero.
The script is economical, intelligent; the acting is solid. The characters aren't the hollow wannabe action heroes of _Resident Evil_; heroine Selena (Naomie Harris) is simultaneously a tough-as-nails survivor and a real woman, haunted by real grief. Jim is no less convincing. The characters are all solid creations, affected in different ways by loss and trauma.

Boyle is able to convey desperation in the details: when Jim and Selena find refuge in the barricaded apartment of father and daughter Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), we glimpse an aquarium where goldfish swim in a scanty few inches of water. The situation is there, literally and figuratively. Our four survivors are literally running out of water, but the sight of the fish swimming clumsily right under a receding waterline suggests more than a water shortage. Later, when our heroes meet up with a group of soldiers who've made a fortress against the infected, the group tries to celebrate with a feast. The mood turns sour when the commanding officer (Christopher Eccleston)spits out the first bite of an omelet - the eggs have gone bad. The characters' reactions reveal the soldiers' group dynamic, and the hollowness of celebration when all you have to celebrate is not being dead. The omelet is also the first tangible hint that not all is well with the boys in uniform.
Intentionally or not, this zombie picture shows its post-AIDS origins. The zombies are `infected,' and the condition is always dealt with in terms of disease. Fights with the monsters are followed by desperate body checks: `Were you bitten?' The piled dead seen throughout the film look more like the victims of plague than of massacres.
The movie is refreshingly free of obvious CGI effects. The monsters look real, because they are, created by actors and good makeup. _28 Days Later_ has its share of horror clichés (most particularly, heroes seem eager to take unnecessary risks, but would it really be fun to see them take the safer route out of the city?), but it manages to avoid pitfalls. This movie fan is particularly sick of that ultimate third-act cop-out: `If you need to up the tension for the finale, just make the monster bigger.' _Aliens_ worked, but that's because a showdown between two hell-raising matriarchs has resonance. _Resident Evil_, a recent zombie flick for kids, subjected audiences to a bogus third-act CGI monster that had little to do with zombies and even less to do with good storytelling. The third act of _28 Days Later_ works, in part because by this point we care about the characters, and in part because (as with the best horror movies) the real horror is powered by human players, not supernatural ones.

Danny Boyle may claim to dislike horror movies, but _28 Days Later_ borrows extensively - and effectively - from the hallowed canon of zombie cinema. The subgenre has always been a delightful mix of brilliance and kitsch, but Boyle tries (sometimes too hard) to avoid the latter. If bearing good cinematic progeny is the only real path to canonical status, George Romero's stature should be enhanced by _28 Days Later_. Jim wanderings through the empty city evoke _Day of the Dead_. A gleeful supermarket visit parallels the mall-plundering in _Dawn of the Dead_. The structure is fundamentally similar to _Dawn of the Dead_: the middle part of the movie is relatively peaceful, with four characters creating their own makeshift family amidst the ruins of the world. As in _Dawn of the Dead_, that peace is disrupted, but not by monsters.
Zombies are the empty vessels of horror. They don't have pre-set personalities and built-in themes, like sultry, oversexed vampires or snarling, beast-within-man werewolves. They depend on their filmmakers for purpose, and they can express an incredibly wide variety of themes. Maybe that's why zombies have had greatest success outside the Hollywood mainstream: Romero didn't answer to Hollywood execs, and Sam Raimi made the first two _Evil Dead_ movies for cheap long before _Spider-Man_. Even within the same trilogy, Romero uses zombies in different ways, focusing on different themes in each film. Compared to these films, or to _28 Days Later_, a standard-issue Hollywood horror hackfest can look pretty soulless. Hopefully, the next Hollywood stab at the subgenre will look more like _28 Days Later_ than _Resident Evil_.
_28 Days Later_ isn't perfect. A few of the best scare scenes are set up in contrived ways. Jim's endgame strategy seems poorly considered. Boyle avoids the kitsch of the subgenre, but contrivance is arguably a worse sin. His style is often too MTV for my taste; some fights with the infected subscribe to the `shock and confuse' school of editing. Boyle's greatest weakness is that he tends to machine-gun themes at you. His theme explicating is often labeled as pretentious; I'd guess that it's not pretentiousness that motivates these didactic bits, but worry that the audience won't know how to feel about the film without them. He should trust his audience more.
The flaws of _28 Days Later_ are clear, but they don't negate the accomplishment. Atmosphere, character, and storytelling get the attention they deserve. The end results make for great horror, and will stay in this viewer's dreams for a while yet.